Arts & Culture
The sports drain on our schools
Tue, 03/09/2010 - 17:51 — Dave Culver- At a teach-in for the March 4 Day of Action to defend public educations, students talked about how sports teams siphon money away from other programs.
- College football is very taxing
- Today's American sports culture is out of bounds
Dave Zirin, SocialistWorker.org
On March 4, I was proud to take part in a student walkout at the University of Maryland in defense of public education. It was just one link in a National Day of Action that saw protests in more than 32 states across the country.
I am not a student, and haven't been since those innocent days when Monica Lewinsky mattered, but I was asked to come speak at a post-walkout teach-in about the way sports is used to attack public education. It might sound like a bizarre topic, but it's the world that students see every day.
At the University of Maryland, as tuition has been hiked and classes cut, football coach Ralph Friedgen makes a base salary of 1.75 million bucks, which would be outrageous even if the team weren't two steps past terrible. Friedgen also gets perks like a $50,000 bonus if none of his players are arrested during the course of the season.
Related:
The Most Drugged-Out Countries
Mon, 03/01/2010 - 09:46 — Dave Culver- Globe Trippin': The most drugged-out countries
- Guess where the U.S. ranks?
Seth Fiegerman, MainStreet.com
Photo Credit: Bistrosavage
We’ve been curious for a while about the drugging and drinking habits of other countries. How does America compare to the rest of the world? Do people in the Far East and Africa drink and smoke as much or more than we do? And which countries are more likely to do harder drugs? So we scoured through various studies in order to find an answer to the question, which countries that do the most drugs.
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a comprehensive report back in 2008 about the drug habits of 17 countries across four continents. To get their statistics, the WHO surveyed more than 85,000 people worldwide, asking a series of questions to determine how much of the population had ever used alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and cocaine. We have blended the poll results for each of these four drugs, weighing them all equally, to determine which country has the highest overall percentage of citizens who confess to using drugs in their lifetime.
Oscar 2010: Jeremy Renner dismantles the war hero
Sat, 02/27/2010 - 09:25 — Dave Culver"The Hurt Locker" is so tense it's easy to miss the actor's economical -- and funny -- performance
Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com
Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker."
At times Jeremy Renner's performance in "The Hurt Locker" is all fingers, though it's never all thumbs. Sometimes it seems that director Kathryn Bigelow shows more of his hands than of his face: Renner's character, Staff Sgt. William James, is a bomb-squad team leader in Iraq circa 2004. He's just been installed as a replacement for the squad's previous leader (Guy Pearce), who's been killed in action. James is a cowboy, at first annoying and angering his team by the way he takes unnecessary risks when he's disarming bombs. But for all his physical swagger -- he's cock of the walk even when he's suited up in the restrictively padded sand-colored snowsuit worn by bomb specialists -- the essence of his job boils down to what he can do with his hands. We see his slightly stubby fingers tracing a length of colored wire from a safe "here" to a lethal "there," or pulling an explosive mechanism apart the way you might pick at the meat of a chicken wing.
Related:
Activists pin hopes on the Academy
Tue, 02/23/2010 - 12:47 — Dave Culver- Using so-called instant-runoff voting, an alternative method of voting long favored by progressive activists as a method of voting they say helps eliminate spoiler candidates, members of the Academy will rank their preferences in the best-movie category, which has expanded to 10 movies for the first time since 1943.
- "Whether it bleeds from the entertainment world to the political world is yet to be seen," said Rob Richie, executive director of the FairVote. "We're trying to make the connection."
Daniel Newhauser, Congress.org
For some Oscar viewers, the excitement this year is not which movie wins Best Picture, but how it will win.
A change in the selection process this year is getting rave reviews from proponents of an alternative method of voting long favored by progressive activists.
Using so-called instant-runoff voting, members of the Academy will rank their preferences in the best-movie category, which has expanded to 10 movies for the first time since 1943.
Advcoates of the system are eagerly keeping watch, hoping the red-carpet moment will bring awareness to a method of voting they say helps eliminate spoiler candidates.